The Problem With Time Line Projects

First of all, let’s ask ourselves why you’re creating this time line in the first place. Is it voluntary or is someone making you do this? Are you depressed/bored/drunk and therefore in need to go down memory lane to assess your life? Or perhaps is it your boss that’s making you do something productive via sneaky route of making you look at your life and therefore seeing that you have yet to actually accomplish anything? Whatever the reasoning, here you are writing the damn thing. So here’s what you’re looking at when you’re faced with working on a project that involves a time line.

ACCURACY SCALE – Whenever I’ve done a timeline thing, which is rarer than very rare mind you, I’ve almost always faced the issue of accuracy. It’s hardly ever on point. Take a ruler for example. You have all these literal dividers measured by millimeters and such. It’s all very on point. The distance between so and so is so and so. When you’re doing a time line project it’s never exact. It’s more like, “Eh, somewhere between here and here I did this, oh but wait there was also this.. I guess we’ll just squeeze it right in there, doesn’t really matter”. So basically your time line ends up looking like a three year old’s drawing where the dog is larger than the tree house and the windows are smaller than the flowers that grow on the tree of that very tree house. You get the picture.

TIME MANAGEMENT – “If it wasn’t for that last minute, nothing would ever get done”. If that right there is not a depiction of us humans, the superior species that are notorious for being fucking lazy and putting shit off til the last minute, then I don’t know what is. Sure we don’t all suck, there are exceptions but I’ve witnessed such a thing far too many times to say that this isn’t just another condemnation upon the human kind without reason, you see. At times, I’ve even been a participant. In fact, my participation in the guilty party has provided me with the ability to detect it in others. Today for instance, I got to see an excellent example of “I missed the deadline, so I’m gonna do a cheap cop out and throw a few things together to pretend like I haven’t been fucking around all week, and like I’m actually handing in a worthy assignment that I’ve worked on for more than 5 minutes and not at all during breakfast half an hour ago.” Saw right through that shit. It’s kinda funny how time management or lack thereof played into it actually, considering it was in fact an assignment about a TIMEline.

CONTENT & ULTIMATE PURPOSE – First of all who is gonna read this shit? Who cares? So you had your first shitty job at McDonalds at the age 14 and you were exploited for your labor at 5.25 an hour. So your beloved childhood dog ate your first hamster on your birthday in front of everyone in your class while the creepy clown was fucking your mom in the broom closet. So your wife used to be a dude, but identifies as a woman because the society says that a vagina isn’t a requirement as long as you have a front opening hole. So all those things fall on your dysfunctional, mathematically incorrect, poorly structured timeline. Nobody cares. Why don’t you put your favorite food as a child on that timeline too while you’re at it, and mark it on the same spot with your grandma’s death because the recipe clearly dies with her, seeing as how that would be the only reason that “favorite food” would ever make it on a time line. I didn’t make this up. This was one of the propositions on the outline for this particular timeline project that a certain someone presented. There was another one that didn’t make sense – “If you could have done a different job, would you have done?”. That’s doesn’t qualify as an event on a TIMELINE as it DID NOT happen.

Basically, what I’m saying is timelines aren’t all that great. What’s even less great is when someone can’t create a semi decent outline for a timeline. For one, I would have totally included things in the category of “First time I ever”. There’s a ton of things that could be put on a timeline with sexual experiences alone. Not to mention a billion other things.